Firtash’ enterprise guards attacked TVi journalists in Cherkasy

"We came in Cherkasy, because we are preparing a report on why it was impossible to determine the winner of parliamentary elections in a local district. Since Mrs.Zhukovskaya heads Azot enterprise, we wanted to shoot wide shots, the logo of the company, and so on. When we started to shoot, two men came out and began to shake the camera, saying it's forbidden to shoot there as it was a private area. I explained that we were standing on the pavement, belonging to the general community. The guards began to squeeze us, one of them threatened us with an arrest for three hours… They behaved as real bulls. One of them attacked us with threats, forced us to erase everything that we recorded, twisted our arms. I managed to grab the equipment and hide in the car "- said the journalist Maxim Savchuk.

"They forced us to erase he video, saying that both of us will be “knocked out". They repeated it several times," - said the operator Anton April.

The camera-group was also forced to leave the place where they parked, explained that there were parking places for the bosses. "Do we have traffic laws that restrict parking for a particular person?" - rhetorically asked Maxim Savchuk.

The journalists called the police and filed an application about the violation of their professional journalist rights under Article 171 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. "We heard a lot about  Valentina Zhukovska, how much she has done for the city, but the behavior of her guards quite differently characterized their leadership" - said Savchuk.

Azot enterprise belongs to Ukrainian tycoon Dmytro Firtash.

IMI media-lawyer Roman Golovenko believes that, because of the behavior of the guards, the police can open proceedings under Art. 171 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, Article 356 (arbitrariness), and articles on bodily injuries.